Mt. Everest Panorama in Google Earth

Mt. Everest — Or known as Mt. Chomolungma in Tibetan and Sagarmāthā (Nepali: सगरमाथा) — is the world’s highest mountain at 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) above sea level . According to the record, thousand of people tried to conquered the Mt. Everest and thus failed.

In May 29, 1953, both Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay break the record. Finally, they reached the top of Mt. Everest for the first time. Since then there are more than 1,000 had followed their foot step make it to the summit. Nobody knows the exact number. However, there are more than 140 climbers died on the way.

On 24th of May, 1989 the Australian photographer and mountaineer Roderick Mackenzie reached the summit. He was number 271 since 1953. Most importantly, he had taken a 360 degree panorama from the top which as far as I know is the only one exist. You may see it in the Panoramas.dk website.

A few days ago, when I saw this panorama by an occasional chance. It has a big visual impact on me. I would think that most of the people would like to know the surrounding hills, it’s orientation, so as to more presence as I do.

I am very pleased that Google Earth has recently added a “mountain” layer to their application. So I do not need to make effort to look for additional information from other sources. I made those mountain placemarks around Mt. Everest based on the “mountain” layer. And based on the distance from the Mt. Everest, I set different image size of title of mountains so you can see the same mountain title size from the summit observatory.

I also designed the upper and lower windows, you can enter into the panorama in upper window , moving the panorama , it will synchronize the lower window to show the title of the mapping of the mountain.

Unfortunately, I can not find the zooming parameter of PhotoOverlay function in the Google Earth API , therefore, I cannot control the lower window to zoom at the same time. I hoped that Google Earth API can provide these features.